Posts

A friend sent me a pointer to an eWeek which states that Apple has a build of Mac OS X for x86, code-named Marklar, that they keep up to date at all times. Obviously it’s a necessary hedge when the PowerPC falls further behind the x86 processors every time a Intel or AMD release a new series of processors. Of course, even if Apple could release x86 machines tomorrow that would run Mac OS X, all of the existing Mac OS applications would have to be ported to the new hardware platform, which would derail Apple for quite some time. If Apple does make the big processor switch, I wouldn’t want to be the person in charge of handling the relations with Mac OS developers. ...

This weekend, my project is installing Gentoo Linux on my laptop. A reader mentioned that Gentoo was one of the distributions that was more KDE-friendly than Red Hat (which we use for just about everything at work), and I decided to go great guns and just install it. Gentoo is not for the faint of heart – the installation process involves booting off of the CDROM and then doing a bunch of stuff at a root prompt. Strangely, I prefer this to the Debian installer, which never fails to leave me with a broken system and poor attitude. Anyway, I installed Gentoo, but I screwed it up. I then managed to successfully recompile the kernel and hack on configs repeatedly until I got everything working as I like. Gentoo’s Portage system seems better than RPM for sure and perhaps even than Debian’s package system. It’s kind of like FreeBSD’s ports system, but I think it’s even cooler than that. Also, Gentoo makes it easy to stay on the absolute bleeding edge of what’s going on, and I’m really into that. The main advantage from my perspective is that it doesn’t have the upgrading problems that plague RPM-based distributions (and just about every other OS). Of course if things take a turn for the worse, I’ll have Red Hat 7.3 back on the system by the end of the day on Tuesday. So far, though, I’m loving Gentoo. ...

Ever since I started watching Simon Cowell, the abrasive British judge on American Idol, I’ve been tempted to start a lot more sentences with the word “look”.

A spokesperson for Thomson says that the licensing terms for Thomson’s MP3 patents haven’t changed.

Last night I read an entry in Eugene Volokh’s blog which made me sit down and think. It’s short, and here’s the meat of it: "LET'S NOT ATTACK OUR SELF-ANNOUNCED ENEMIES NOW; IF NEED BE, WE CAN ATTACK THEM LATER, WHEN THEY HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS." On thinking more about the Iraq debate, I realized that the above line is a pretty apt summary of the bottom-line plan that the anti-preemption forces advocate. Reading that gave me some trouble, because at first I kind of bought it. Then I realized that there are really plenty of other outcomes that are possible, not just attacking now and winning, or being forced to attack later and dealing with an opponent with nuclear arms. I’m not categorically against going to war with Iraq, I just haven’t seen the case made that it’s a necessity at this point. Furthermore, I feel like we’re kind of being railroaded by the administration and the hawks. Posts like the one above seem to assert that there are two options: take care of Saddam Hussein now, while he’s weaker, or let him bully us later when he’s got nuclear clout. However, the spectrum of possible outcomes is a hell of a lot wider than that. Let’s categorize them two ways: we go to war, and we don’t go to war. We go to war with Iraq: ...

baseballreference.com has the coolest idea yet for raising money to support the site. If you’ve never visited the site, it provides career statistics for (as far as I know) every player in major league history, among other things. They’re allowing people to sponsor individual pages on the site – you can think of each site as sort of an online baseball card. Anyway, normal people can pony up to sponsor their favorite players and businesses can pony up to sponsor the pages of more popular players. THe price for each page is scaled based on the popularity of the player (ergo, traffic to the page). Another cool thing is that the enterprising player who earns money by selling memorabilia and autographs could sponsor their own page with a pointer to their memorabilia site. ...

I’d consider doing all my work in Linux if I could get my Linux desktop to look like this. But I don’t know how to get there. I think the problem is that Cygwin is a crutch. If Cygwin didn’t make Windows so much less unpleasant, I would probably be inspired to get off my butt and actually start fiddling around more with Linux. As it is, I have two laptops on my desk at work, both identical Dells, and the one that’s always in my docking station is the one running Windows 2000 rather than the one running Red Hat 7.3. I do perhaps 5 or 10 percent of my work on the Linux box, but I could probably do 80% of it there if I didn’t find the Linux desktop environment so unappealing. I could probably make it a lot less unappealing if I were forced to use it, but I’m not. I’d be totally fine with the current arrangement were it not for my conscience. I’m a tortured soul. ...

Everybody knows that the browser war is over, right? Well it’s still going hot and heavy here at rc3.org. Yesterday, there were more hits from Mozilla (not all of Netscape’s browsers, just Mozilla) than there were from Internet Explorer. That’s pretty impressive, even when you count in the fact that my hits to the site skew the numbers in Mozilla’s favor slightly.

Looks like people are finally getting the kick in the pants they needed to move to Ogg Vorbis. I shall begin re-ripping my MP3 collection post haste.

As you’d expect, the Detroit Free Press has a very detailed article on the four men indicted on terrorism charges yesterday, including details on their capture and what they’re accused of. This is the first terrorism indictment handed down since the government began rounding people up after 9/11.